Remembering the Details: Effects of Emotion

By Elizabeth A. Kensinger. Emotion Review, 2009

840 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Though emotion conveys memory benefits, it does not enhance memory equally for all aspects of an experience, nor for all types of emotional events. In this review, I outline the behavioral evidence for arousal's focal enhancements of memory and describe the neural processes that may support those focal enhancements. I also present behavioral evidence to suggest that these focal enhancements occur more often for negative experiences than for positive ones. This result appears to arise because of valence-dependent effects on the neural processes recruited during episodic encoding and retrieval, with negative affect associated with increased engagement of sensory processes, and positive affect leading to enhanced recruitment of conceptual processes.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98c4c3663fdafb258a876ce9e8ccdb6e6d25355d

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Sleep’s Role in the Consolidation of Emotional Episodic Memories (2010, neutral): “…the likelihood that such trade-offs occur (Reisberg & Heuer, 2004), and neuroimaging studies have implicated the engagement of affectiveattentional processes during encoding in the formation of a memory that will only include a subset of the details processed during an event (Kensinger, 2009).”
Motivation and the Goal Theory of Current Concerns (2011, background): “, 1999) with somewhat different functions and consequences, such as for accuracy of recall (Kensinger, 2009) and, certainly, subjective experience.”
Arousal-biased competition in perception and memory (2011, positive): “Kensinger (2007, 2009) outlined a similar model in which negative emotional arousal (rather than emotional arousal more generally) enhances memory for the intrinsic details of negative events while impairing memory for extrinsic contextual details.”
The motivational dimensional model of affect: Implications for breadth of attention, memory, and cognitive categorisation (2010, background): “In addition to attentional processes, emotions influence processes involved in the formation, retrieval, and distortion of memories (Brown & Kulik, 1977 ; Cahill & McGaugh, 1995 ; Kensinger, 2009a ).”
Context is Everything (in Emotion Research) (2018, background): “For example, the impact of goal‐based features of the situation (e.g., competition) on emotion processes may depend on relational features of the situation (e.g., the nature of the relationship between participants; Van Van Kleef et al., 2010).”
Effects of Different Types of Virtual Reality Display on Presence and Learning in a Safety Training Scenario (2018, background): “In turn, emotional intensity aroused by an experience, and negative emotions in particular, can increase the retention of memory allowing for a better recall [24], [25].”